[Noisebridge-board] noisebridge quarterly financials

[Noisebridge Treasurer]

Patrick, I don't have time to answer your questions. Noisebridge is
not a poorly-run corporation. It is a very well-run hackerspace.
Please learn more about Noisebridge before you ask me to do things
that will take up my time and which are not a priority to the
membership. If you want to contribute to Noisebridge, you should do
something in the space or ask what you can do to help.

I'm not trying to stonewall you; I'm totally willing to take ten
minutes to give financial data to people that care about Noisebridge,
but you don't ask 10 minute questions. Here are some answers that will
take more than 10 minutes but less than an hour:

> Are any of the historical financials reliable?
That depends on your definition of reliable. They do convey
information. I think that the 2008 financials are probably reliable
and the 2009 financials may contain artifacts.

> If they are, would it be
> possible to get quarterly financials (balance sheet & income statement) from
> you as far back as possible?

I posted financials for 2010 to discuss that roughly cover the
information you're asking for (they are monthly, grouped by quarter,
with the prior month shown). Xero records go back to roughly fall 2008
and while Xero does create individual reports fairly quickly, it
doesn't make a quarterly historical report, so I would have to do it
manually. Furthermore, the reports do contain fields that may be
inaccurate, so I would need to sit down and look at the data for a
while. Prior to fall 2008, our records are in a Quicken database which
Mitch sent me last month before vacation and which I will soon be
getting running on a Windows machine so that we can send tax receipts
to donors from that period. Aside from monthly reconciliation and
paying the bills, my top priority right now is the backlog of tax
receipts from the two previous treasurers.

As far as taxes, our 2009 taxes were done by a professional and there
were a number of complications towards the end of Jeffrey's term over
trying to get them accurate and submitted. I've been trying to find
out the status of the return for a couple of months now and haven't
heard back from Jeffrey so I've contacted the lawyer directly and will
hopefully get that sorted. I don't know which forms were included in
the return. Mitch was treasurer prior to 2009 so he will have to tell
you about previous returns.

>I will physically print them and include them in a Noisebridge corporate binder.

I think that keeping financial information in a binder at Noisebridge
is a reasonable idea, but it would probably be even better to have an
online repository of this information. Either way, it's not something
we've historically done, and I would want to ping the people about
liabilities to consider first, but I don't see why it wouldn't be
doable. I would also want to check the numbers a bit first. An emailed
pdf report may be cursory, but printouts in a binder will be
interpreted as final and official, and I'd like to make sure they're
as accurate as I can make them first.

-Kelly

On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 13:58, Patrick Keys <citizenkeys at gmail.com> wrote:
> Kelly,
> Are any of the historical financials reliable?  If they are, would it be
> possible to get quarterly financials (balance sheet & income statement) from
> you as far back as possible? Quarterly reports should be for 3/31, 6/30,
> 9/30, and 12/31 as far back as possible.  Ideally, just them out to pdf ( i
> use pdfcreator ) and zip them all up in a .zip file and email them to me.  I
> will physically print them and include them in a Noisebridge corporate
> binder.  In theory, somebody does taxes for noisebridge, so at least yearly
> financials should be possible based on tax reports.
>
> All this leads to yet another important question... even though Noisebridge
> has no employees, Noisebridge has an EIN ( 26-3507741 ). Employees or not,
> Noisebridge legally needs to be submitting quarterly form 941's ( employee
> taxes ) and yearly form 940's ( unemployment taxes ).  Not filing these
> could cause the tax-exempt status to get revoked real fast by the IRS, or at
> least result in having to pay fines.  Any idea if the 941's/940's are
> actually being filed?
>
>
> Patrick
>